To ensure that people with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) get the care they need, it would help if a simple blood test could predict early on which patients are most likely to progress to severe and life-threatening illness—and which are more likely to recover without much need for medical intervention. Now, researchers have provided some
Source NIH Researchers at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), a part of the National Institutes of Health, have identified a specific, front-line defense that limits the infection to the olfactory bulb and protects the neurons of the olfactory bulb from damage due to the infection. Neurons in the nose respond to
Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine are recommending that all COVID-19 patients admitted to the ICU undergo a thromboelastography (TEG) to test for the risk of forming blood clots. This recommendation comes after they found that more than half of the patients tested under these same conditions developed clinically significant blood clots that went undetected using routine
More reports of the unexpected inflammatory condition seen in a small number of children with the coronavirus infection are shedding light on common characteristics of the children. A new study from Paris found that black children appear disproportionately more likely to develop the symptoms than other children. These findings echo the pattern seen in adults where black patients
Early data from a clinical study suggest that blocking the Bruton tyrosine kinase (BTK) protein provided clinical benefit to a small group of patients with severe COVID-19. Researchers observed that the off-label use of the cancer drug acalabrutinib, a BTK inhibitor that is approved to treat several blood cancers, was associated with reduced respiratory distress
Patients (n = 25) with severe and/or life-threatening COVID-19 disease were enrolled at the Houston Methodist hospitals from March 28 – April 14, 2020. Patients were transfused with convalescent plasma obtained from donors with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection and had recovered. The primary study outcome was safety, and the secondary outcome was clinical status at day
After noticing unusual blood clotting in many patients diagnosed with COVID-19, doctors at Emory University believe there may be a connection to the thickness of their blood, known as hyperviscosity, with inflammation and clotting. The correspondence, which links hyperviscosity and severity of illness, has been published in The Lancet’s online first section. “It has been a mystery
Infusions of antibody-rich blood plasma from people who have recovered from the coronavirus, so-called convalescent plasma, failed to make a difference in a study of hospitalized patients in China, researchers reported on Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In a randomized trial involving 103 COVID-19 patients, convalescent plasma made no difference in
The first COVID-19 case was identified in New York City on February 29. Since then, the city has been considered one of the epicenters of the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. To identify the early transmission events underlying the rapid spread of the virus in the NYC metropolitan area, a team from the Icahn School of Medicine
Eli Lilly has begun dosing COVID-19 patients in a phase 1 trial of its AbCellera-partnered antibody. The initiation of the trial, which happened ahead of schedule, marks the start of a new phase of the response to SARS-CoV-2 in which study subjects will receive drugs designed specifically for the virus. The first clinical trials of drugs to
